When Italian fabulist Italo Calvino died on September 19, 1985, of a brain haemorrhage at 61, Umberto Eco wrote a long obituary almost eclipsing the news of the Mexico earthquake. In the New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal said, “Europe regarded Calvino’s death as a calamity for culture.” Italy went into mourning, “as if a beloved prince had died.”
He has written realistic stories (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), folk fables (Italian Folktales), allegorical fantasies rooted in reality (Our Ancestors), and essays — “never doing the same thing twice.” After his death, a collection of articles was published on ‘his’ classics: the writers and poets who had meant the most to him, at different stages of his life with an elegant defence of literature in the title essay, Why Read the Classics?
As his wife Esther writes in the preface to the English translation by Martin McLaughlin published in 1999, though Calvino wanted essays, “as occasional and disparate as my own,” to be collected only when the author was dead or old, he began to gather his non-fiction around 1980. In 36 essays, he explains the works of writers as varied as Tolstoy, Pasternak, Defoe, Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Twain, James, Borges and Hemingway, and in an ode to the old, he introduces us to Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Galileo and Pliny.
What is a classic?
In the eponymous essay, Calvino offers 14 definitions of what makes a classic, waving away the gaps we may have in our reading, in light-hearted banter: “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I'm rereading... never I’m reading’... The iterative prefix ‘re-’ in front of the verb ‘read’ can represent a small act of hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, all one need do is to point out that however wide-ranging any person’s formative reading may be, there will always be an enormous number of fundamental works that one has not read.”
A classic is a book, according to Calvino, which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading; it is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers. They come to us “bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures through which they have passed.” Applying this both to ancient and modern classics, Calvino says, “If I read The Odyssey, I read Homer’s text but I cannot forget all the things that Ulysses’ adventures have come to mean in the course of the centuries... If I read Kafka, I find myself approving or rejecting the legitimacy of the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ which we hear constantly being used to refer to just about anything.”
Most of all, ‘your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, “and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.”
Sudipta Datta looks back at one classic each fortnight.